Buffalo – 30 major roof collapses, 100 minor collapses

More collapses expected. Homeowners and store employees scrambling to remove the snow before rainfall adds even more weight to overloaded roofs.

The county reports 30 major roof collapses as the region recovers from the historic storm that dumped more than 7 feet (2.13 m) of snow on the area in only three days. Buffalo normally gets around 8 feet of snow during an entire winter season.

Emergency workers are also monitoring hundreds of structures at risk for collapse. The thirty major roof collapses were largely farm buildings and those with flat roofs. As many as 100 minor roof collapses have also occurred, and more than 50 people have been evacuated from mobile homes because roofs were buckling.

Most of the collapses followed warning signs, such as groaning or cracks in walls. The county advises that residents who hear or see such warning signs should call 911 and consider evacuating.

County officials expect the number of collapses to increase once daylight breaks.

The storms have been blamed for at least 13 deaths across western New York.

A Facebook group called WNY November 2014 Storm Help has been set up for residents to connect with each other, ask for help and report areas in need of assistance. Volunteers are on the page offering to help shovel people out, or bring supplies where needed.

Providing that all we are dealing with for the foreseeable future is a little ice age we have entered an age where flat and low pitched roofs are now dangerously obsolete. Steep roofs and thick walls with lots of insulation are now the thing to have.
As an architect Robert I am sure you can appreciate this. If we are going into a major glaciation such reforms should be used south of the Ohio river and everything north of that is a write off. It speaks volumes of the folly of treating real estate as an investment vehicle instead of being a place to live.

Once the snow is deep enough to bury a building then it doesn’t matter how steep the roof is, nor how thick the walls are: it’ll be crushed.
It’ll be more realistic to try stop it accumulating in the first instance by heating the building with powerful heaters, futile as that would be.

Another sure sign of CAGW! If Americans weren’t so “stupid”, as Obamacare architect Gruber calls us, we’d all see the reason for 7 feet of snow in Buffalo. Everyone should understand that GW has raised the temperature of the Great Lakes so much that even the slight cooling we just had this past week can create huge amounts of lake snows.